Basement Duty

As my wife makes a final editorial pass of all my recent changes, I’m sort of on hold, story wise, so I’m working on house stuff. The long-planned for basement renovation is slotted for this year, so I’m doing my best to organize it.

Writing wise I’m going to revise that new Dabir and Asim story I wrote in December here pretty soon, and maybe take a crack at writing another one, and then it ought to be time to review any editorial suggestions and turn book 1 back over to agent and editor and get to revising book 2.

At the end of last week I finished another Marvin Albert book. I’ve read his series westerns, I’ve read three of his hardboiled detective novels, two of his four mercenary adventure novels, and one standalone western and I have YET to read one that wasn’t good. Maybe none are outright masterpieces, but he is so dependably good I have developed a profound respect for the man. I have one of his later novels, one of a series about a detective in France, and I’ll get to it soon. And I bet it’s good, too, because it has a reputation for excellence.

If you like terse writing and compelling narratives and well-motivated characters, oh, yes, and fine action scenes, Albert ALWAYS comes through. And he’s not writing the same story over and over, either.

I’ll write more about him later. For now, here’s a link to Bill Crider’s excellent essay about Albert’s work.